On Innovation-Based Triggering for Event-Based Nonlinear State Estimation Using the Particle Filter

Event-based sampling has been proposed as a general technique for lowering the average communication rate, energy consumption and computational burden in remote state estimation. However, the design of the event trigger is critical for good performance. In this paper, we study the combination of innovation-based triggering and state estimation of nonlinear dynamical systems using the particle filter. It is found that innovation-based triggering is easily incorporated into the particle filter framework, and that it vastly outperforms the classical send-on-delta scheme for certain types of nonlinear systems. We further show how the particle filter can be used to jointly precompute the future state estimates and trigger probabilities, thus eliminating the need for periodic observer-to-sensor communication, at the cost of increased computational burden at the observer. For wireless, battery-powered sensors, this enables the radio to be turned off between sampling events, which is key to saving energy.